the Netherlandish people, of establishing an arbitrary power in that
country. He therefore advised her to deceive the nobles by the very
arts which they had hitherto employed against herself, and to secure
them through smooth words and an obliging behavior. The king, he
concluded, who knew the nobles to be the hidden springs of all the
previous troubles, would take good care to lay hands upon them at the
first favorable opportunity, as well as the two whom he had already in
Spain; and did not mean to let them go again, having sworn to make an
example in them which should horrify the whole of Christendom, even if
it should cost him his hereditary dominions. This piece of evil news
was strongly corroborated by the letters which Bergen and Montigny wrote
from Spain, and in which they bitterly complained of the contemptuous
behavior of the grandees and the altered deportment of the monarch
towards them; and the Prince of Orange was now fully sensible what he
had to expect from the fair promises of the king.

The letter of the minister, Alava, together with some others from Spain,
which gave a circumstantial account of the approaching warlike visit of
the king, and of his evil intentions against the nobles, was laid by the
prince before his brother, Count Louis of Nassau, Counts Egmont, Horn,
and Hogstraten, at a meeting at Dendermonde in Flanders, whither these
five knights had repaired to confer on the measures necessary for their
security. Count Louis, who listened only to his feelings of
indignation, foolhardily maintained that they ought, without loss of
time, to take up arms and seize some strongholds. That they ought at
all risks to prevent the king's armed entrance into the provinces. That
they should endeavor to prevail on the Swiss, the Protestant princes of
Germany, and the Huguenots to arm and obstruct his passage through their
territories; and if, notwithstanding, he should force his way through
these impediments, that the Flemings should meet him with an army on the